WMR has learned from U.S. intelligence sources that the Justice Department's Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), the warrantless domestic wiretapping program largely conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA), was a mere bureaucratic contrivance developed by the Justice Department to legally cover the NSA from constitutional oversight hearings by Congress and law suit actions from telecommunication customers over what amounted to total surveillance of the American people.

The NSA operation, code named STELLAR WIND, and known only to a few top officials in the Bush administration, targeted massive collected digital databases of phone calls, emails, faxes, pagers, and other digital communications. The data, known as meta-data, was searched by NSA signals intelligence analysts for key words and phrases using a Google-like search engine.

The STELLAR WIND program was overseen by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief counsel David Addington. In a new twist, intelligence sources report that the plans for STELLAR WIND were put into place long before the 9/11 attacks. Qwest chairman Joseph Nacchio claimed that he and his firm were pressured by NSA six months prior to 9/11 to participate in a program to conduct warrantless surveillance of Qwest customers. Nacchio and Qwest believed the program was illegal and demanded court warrants. Nacchio was later indicted and convicted for insider trading, a move Qwest sources claim was government retaliation for Nacchio's refusal to participate in the wiretapping programs. It is now been revealed to WMR that the program in question was, in fact, STELLAR WIND.

On February 25, 2010, WMR reported: "WMR has learned from sources who worked in senior positions for the telecommunications company Qwest that its former Chairman and CEO Joseph Nacchio was threatened with retaliation after he refused to participate in an unconstitutional and illegal National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping program after he met with NSA officials on February 27, 2001, some six months before the 9/11 attacks. Nacchio refused to turn over customer records without a court order -- something NSA did not possess at the time it made its requests....

After Nacchio refused NSA's requests on the grounds that it was illegal, sources close to Nacchio reported his legal problems with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission began in earnest. First, Qwest lost out on several lucrative federal government contracts and second, Nacchio was indicted and convicted in 2007 of 19 counts of insider stock trading. Nacchio was sentenced to six years the Schuylkill federal prison camp in Minersville, Pennsylvania where he is now assigned prisoner number 33973-013."

WMR has learned additional technical details about STELLAR WIND. The NSA was able to conduct key word and key phrase differentiation between various American accents by using sophisticated algorithms. The software used by NSA could determine the spoken word "car" in a Bostonian accent as opposed to the spoken word "car" in a Midwestern or Southern accent. The NSA algorithms could also determine spoken words in New York, Philadelphia, Hispanic, Asian, New Orleans, French Canadian, African American, Tidewater Virginian, and Native American accents, as well as others....

TARGETING JOURNALISTS

In addition to STELLAR WIND's warrantless tracking and analysis of meta-data containing all the communications of Americans, another super-classified code-named NSA program monitored the communications of U.S. journalists. At least 150 U.S. journalists were subjected to NSA surveillance. There is some evidence that the surveillance was also conducted prior to 9/11....since 9/11 is well known now to be an inside job....

A U.S. intelligence source confirmed that among the journalists monitored were "Sy Hersh, James Bamford, Wayne Madsen, Siobhan Gorman, James Risen, Bill Gertz...."

NSA's "Q Group" security branch maintains a file on many of the surveilled journalists. WMR has learned that the files include the driver's license photos of journalists, including the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles license of this editor. The FBI is an active participant in the NSA journalist surveillance program. The Stasi-like electronic and physical surveillance continues to this day.....

Of particular interest to NSA analysts were the satellite-borne communications of U.S. journalists reporting from foreign locations, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran,Lebanon, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries...

WHO ELSE HAS BEEN UNDER TOTAL SURVEILLANCE?

Although NSA's surveillance of journalists would appear to be a major and egregious violation of the Constitution, there is evidence that STELLAR WIND had another, more sinister, off-shoot. The most sensitive program conducted warrantless electronic surveillance of elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as federal and state judges. WMR has previously reported that the communications and transactional data of Governors Bill Richardson of New Mexico and former Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York were subjected to NSA surveillance. The surveillance of the two governors has been confirmed by extremely knowledgeable sources...

The future for NSA's warrantless total surveillance programs appears rosy. NSA is building a $2 billion, 120 acre meta-data facility at Camp Williams in Utah and another similar data repository in San Antonio, Texas. Data storage capabilities are also being expanded at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland and at NSA's huge signals intelligence collection facility at Menwith Hill, UK. The Congress has made no move to question the NSA's warrantless spying on Americans and President Obama flipped his position when he backed retroactive immunity for telecommunication firms that illegally participated in STELLAR WIND and its affiliated surveillance programs before and after 9/11....the Mega insider job.

Federal national security sources have revealed to WMR that the FBI electronic surveillance that resulted in the impeachment, expulsion as Governor of Illinois, and indictment of Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges was originally directed by the outgoing George W. Bush administration against presidential candidate and subsequent President-elect Barack Obama and his prospective chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Although the Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney for northern Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald and his team of prosecutors captured "thousands of phone calls" in their investigation of Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris, they chose to only concentrate on those intercepted phone calls that were used to indict Blagojevich and Harris. In fact, WMR has learned that when Obama and Emanuel became aware that their phone calls were intercepted by the FBI, they moved fast to have Fitzgerald arrest Blagojevich in the early morning of December 9, 2009. The White House transition team wanted to ensure that it was Blagojevich who was at the center of the FBI wiretaps. Bush and his team, according to WMR's sources sought to obtain information on Obama and Emanuel that could be used to "blackmail them" in order to ensure that there would be no investigations of the Bush administration's complicity in torture, political prosecutions throughout the United States of Democrats, and other illegal activities.

Fitzgerald maintains that the thousands of intercepted calls were made between October 22, 2008, a few weeks prior to Obama's election victory, and December 9, 2008, the day Blagojevich was arrested without an indictment. After Blagojevich's arrest by U.S. marshals, Fitzgerald took the unusual step of holding a news conference, rife with theatrics, in which he railed that Blagojevich's conduct would make "Lincoln roll over in his grave." Criticisms from legal experts that Fitzgerald was engaged in pre-trial grandstanding to influence public opinion were dismissed by Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald's move came after Emanuel made direct contact with Fitzgerald, ostensibly to inform him that Blagojevich was attempting to "sell" Obama's Senate seat.

WMR has been told that Emanuel was aware of the damaging nature of the "thousands" of FBI intercepted phone calls to him and Obama and wanted to divert Fitzgerald and the FBI away from he and the president-elect to Blagojevich and Harris. Fitzgerald, known as the man who covered up key elements of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and saw to it that the legal ground was laid for a commutation of the prison sentence of Dick Cheney's cef of staff Scooter Libby in the Bush administration's cover-up of the outing by the media of CIA non-official cover agent Valerie Plame Wilson, decided to seek authorization for the early morning arrest of Blagojevich to protect Obama and Emanuel, as well as Bush.

Fitzgerald lived up to his part of the bargain with Emanuel by interviewing Obama, Emanuel, and Jarrett in mid-December 2008 and then green lighting Obama's selectee as White House chief counsel, Greg Craig, to issue a report stating that there was "no inappropriate contact" between Obama, Emanuel, or Jarret with Blagojevich. Emanuel quickly left the United States for a vacation in Africa. Fitzgerald cautioned Obama, Emanuel, Jarrett, adviser David Axelrod, Craig, and transition team spokesman Robert Gibbs to remain silent and not disclose anything to the press. The diversion of attention by the public and the media to Blagojevich and Harris was successful.

On July 29, 2009, WMR reported: "If the Fitzgerald prosecution of Blagojevich is any indication, some GOP U.S. Attorneys may have decided to trade knowledge and influence in return for keeping their jobs. In Fitzgerald's case, it was possibly information he had on convicted Chicago political kingpin Antoin 'Tony' Rezko's links to Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel that made Blagojevich a useful "sacrificial lamb" to send a message to the Obama camp. In any event, Fitzgerald's plan worked -- he remains secure as Obama's U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois."

In his April 22 motion, Blagojevich's defense team states: "Tony Rezko is one of the government’s main witnesses.8 Mr. Rezko’s credibility is extremely relevant in this trial. In many instances, Mr. Rezko is the government’s crucial witness to prove up their allegations. Mr. Rezko wrote a letter to a federal judge stating 'the prosecutors have been overzealous in pursuing a crime that never happened. They are pressuring me to tell them the 'wrong' things that I supposedly know about Governor Blagojevich and Senator Obama. I have never been a party to any wrongdoing that involved the Governor or the Senator. I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes.' (Exhibit A) However, the defense has a good faith belief that Mr. Rezko, President Obama’s former friend, fund-raiser, and neighbor told the FBI and the United States Attorneys a different story about President Obama. In a recent in camera proceeding, the government tendered a three paragraph letter indicating that Rezko 'has stated in interviews with the government that he engaged in election law violations by personally contributing a large sum of cash to the campaign of a public official who is not Rod Blagojevich. … Further, the public official denies being aware of cash contributions to his campaign by Rezko or others and denies having conversations with Rezko related to cash contributions. … Rezko has also statedin interviews with the government that he believed he transmitted a quid pro quo offer from a lobbyist to the public official, whereby the lobbyist would hold a fundraiser for the official in exchange for favorable official action, but that the public official rejected the offer. The public official denies any such conversation. In addition, Rezko has stated to the government that he and the public official had certain conversations about gaming legislation and administration, which the public official denies having had."

The reason behind U.S. Judge James Zagel's order that many of the documents related to the Blagojevich indictment remain redacted is that the documents show the extensive nature of the FBI's surveillance of many of those connected to the Obama campaign, including Obama, Emanuel, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, and others.

On April 22, 2010, the Blagojevich defense team, in their motion to Zagel, a Ronald Reagan appointee, to call Obama as a witness in the Blagojevich trial, wrote: "Although it is the defense’s position that all tapes and sealed information be made public, to comply with the Protective Order of April 14, 2009, portions that contain sealed information provided by the government have been redacted. The defense, however, urges this Court unseal the entire motion."

However, Fitzgerald is adamantly opposed to unsealing the redacted documents lest his complicity in a Bush-ordered wiretap of Obama and Emanuel becomes known to the public. Fitzgerald's knowledge of "smoking gun" evidence against Obama and Emanuel ensured that Obama renominated Fitzgerald as U.S. Attorney for northern Illinois. By focusing his criminal probe on Blagojevich and Harris, Fitzgerald is also providing protection for Bush, Dick Cheney, and then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey from potential repercussions from a White House-ordered electronic surveillance program directed against a presidential candidate/president-elect and his top political adviser.

The word from federal national security officials is that the outgoing Bush administration picked up a wealth of blackmailable intelligence on Obama and Emanuel from their wiretaps of the now President and his chief of staff. Obama's sleazy deals with Rezko and his shopping of his Senate seat and Emanuel's contacts with Israeli intelligence officials and his penchant for bizarre behavior at Chicago gymnasiums frequented by the city's professional and affluent gay community reportedly stand at the top of the FBI's "catch..."